Thu, 17 December 2015
Charlie Guo started his first company at Stanford, left it, and did the famed YCombinator in Silicon Valley. While the startup fizzled out, Charlie learned a lot of lessons along the way. He made some friends. Charlie interviewed startup founders from companies including DoorDash, ZeroCater, and Zenefits, and turned it into the book Unscalable. The founders share the behind-the-scenes "dirty work" to success. Working 20 hour days, managing 100's of orders in a simple excel spreadsheet, etc.. whatever it takes. "These interviews pull back the veil on a much more eclectic mix of strategies and experiments, revealing the longer and less predictable road to success in Silicon Valley." The book will be released January 19th, 2016 (Pre-order now: I read an advanced copy and it is phenomenal). We discuss:
Selected Links from The Episode: More about Charlie Guo Charlie Guo based in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the heart of the world he portrays. A software engineer by trade, he has also founded two companies. While getting his undergraduate degree at Stanford, he founded the education-tech company ClassOwl. ClassOwl partners with Stanford and other schools to improve student-teacher communication and productivity, and in startup-storybook fashion it was sold by Guo’s cofounders in 2015 to Branch Metrics. After graduation, he launched a second company, FanHero, which was accepted into Y Combinator, a prestigious startup accelerator program based in Silicon Valley. His own experiences working to make his ideas fly exposed him to the inner workings of the startup culture and inspired him to reach out to a fascinating mix of tech founders to share their experiences.
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Thu, 10 December 2015
Martin Mignot is a Venture Capitalist @ IndexVentures. A large VC firm out of London, their investments include DropBox and Skype, tools we use to make the Food Startups Podcast. Martin is actively looking after Index's investments in Algolia, Blablacar, Capitaine Train,Drivy, Rad, Swiftkey, TheFamily and Deliveroo: an on-demand food delivery startup who just raised 100 million. The food delivery space is hot: over 1,000,000,000 USD was invested in 2014 alone. We talk about his theses and predictions for the exploding sector from his article: The Billion Dollar Food Delivery Wars (TechCrunch). Make sure to check it out before listening. Note: We had a few sound quality issues on the episode. But for the insights from Martin, it was worth editing it the best we could and putting it live! Martin and I discuss:
Selected links from the episode: Index Ventures |
Thu, 3 December 2015
In 1962, Frieda Caplan introduced an exotic fruit to the United States, which she named the Kiwi. Fast forward to 2013, 62 million pounds of kiwi were sold! In the 50+ years since, Frieda's has played a part in introducing more than 200 specialty fruits and vegetables. A documentary about the company, Fear No Fruit, was recently released telling their amazing story. I speak with her daughter, Karen Caplan, who has been the CEO since 1986. Tons to learn here:
Selected links from the show:
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